Ziggy Nixon

Comment Threads

• Ioan commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  "And we can safely agree that conditions for such levels of development weren't developed enough pre-war, it is only after the war was over and new status-quo was pretty much established, we could say something definite about comparing states and epochs within same period. Not to talk about post-Cold War globalization, that allowed things like HDI to be calculated on common basis, and etc." While we have to be careful in applying modern HDI to older times, the alternative isn't to assume that all European countries were equally developed. That's why I await historian's attempts to calculate historical HDI the...
• Dave Lester commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Charlie, In an effort to cheer you up -- and since I no longer have a sensible outlet for a bit of fan-fic... ... here are some insider facts and rumours about the "Manchester College", that may be of use if you decide to go with a "side-quest" for a quick Laundry novel. Just remember everything is possible in a Wheeler-Everett Multi-verse, and that causality is not necessarily what it appears to be. Facts The Manchester Baby really did start the use of software. Though Kilburn and Williams (both dead) were really just testing their cathode ray tube storage technology,...
• Elderly Cynic commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Er, not all of that is quite correct. What or who started software is moot. Without denying what you say: weaving cards and knitting patterns are programs, and the latter are amazingly powerful; Ada Lovelace first described modern software for a general-purpose computer; and David Wheeler (of Cambridge) is usually credited with inventing subroutines and libraries. No, the Atlas 1 was NOT the first computer with a floating-point unit. The English Electric Mercury II was first commissioned in 1958, had one, and even it was probably not the first....
• Dave Lester commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Sorry about the confusion over Atlas and Mercury: these are two rooms next to one another and both machines were way before my time! Software -- quite agree, though I'd heard the one in which Tony Hoare invented the use of stacks for subroutines. Nevertheless, I find the Laundry series is best (for me) when the weirdness is "close" to the real world; it doesn't take much in the way of tweaks to get interesting stories....
• Elderly Cynic commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Whereas my first job was programming a Mercury :-) I used the Atlas/Titan at Cambridge, too. Yes, those were the days when Manchester led the world in computer design....